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After its second defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, under whom unemployment has never been lower than the day George W. Bush left office, the Republican Party has at last awakened to its existential crisis.

At the presidential level, the Republican Party is at death's door.

Yet one already sees the same physicians writing prescriptions for the same drugs that have been killing the GOP since W's dad got the smallest share of the vote by a Republican candidate since William Howard Taft in 1912.

Would the GOP wipeout in those heavily Catholic, ethnic, socially conservative, blue-collar bastions of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois, which Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan swept, have anything to do with the fact that the United States since 2000 has lost 6 million manufacturing jobs and 55,000 factories?

Those jobs were outsourced. And in the deindustrialization of America, the Republican Party has been a culpable co-conspirator.

Bush I and II pumped for NAFTA, GATT, the WTO and opening America's borders to all goods made by our new friends in the People's Republic of China.

Swiftly, U.S. multinationals shut factories here, laid off workers, outsourced production to Asia and China and brought their finished goods back, tax-free, to sell in the U.S.A. Profits soared, as did the salaries of the outsourcing executives.

And their former workers? They headed for the service sector, along with their wives, to keep up on the mortgage payment, keep the kids in Catholic school and pay for the health insurance the family had lost.

Tuesday, these ex-Reagan Democrats came out to vote against some guy from Bain Capital they had been told in ads all summer was a big-time outsourcer who wrote in 2008 “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt!”

Republicans also are falling all over one another to express a love of Hispanics after Mitt Romney won only 27 percent of a Hispanic vote that is now 10 percent of the national vote.

And what is the proposed solution to the GOP's Hispanic problem, coming even from those supposedly on the realistic right? Amnesty for the illegals.

And what might be problematic about following this advice?

Assume in a decade that 10 million illegal aliens became citizens and voted like the Hispanics, blacks and Asians already here. The best the GOP could expect — the Bush share in 2004 — would be 40 percent, or 4 million of those votes.

Consider legal immigration. Forty million legal immigrants have arrived in recent decades. Some 85 percent come from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Most arrived lacking the academic, language and labor skills to compete for high-paying jobs.

What does government do for them?

Subsidizes their housing and provides free education for their kids from Head Start through K-12, plus food stamps and school lunches, Pell Grants and student loans for college, Medicaid if they are sick, earned income tax credits if they work and 99 weeks of unemployment checks if they lose their jobs.

Why would they vote for a party that is going to cut taxes they do not pay and take away government benefits they receive?

Again it needs be said: When the country looks like California demographically, it will look like California politically. Republicans are not whistling past the graveyard. They are right at the entrance.

Pat Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”

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